Asiamet Resources (LSE:ARS) — Investor Update - Ramp Up Imminent

0:01 Welcome to the ARES STRATEGIC MINING INvestor Presentation. Throughout today's recorded meeting, attendees will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions at any time and press send. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and I'm sure the company will be most grateful for your participation. And now I'd like to hand over to CEO James Walker. James, good afternoon. Hi, everyone. How's it going?

0:29 K. Great. Well, look, I'm very happy to run through this presentation very quickly and then, take some, questions and, provide some answers, following it. Let me bring up this thing in form. So I think it's always important just to start with, what what Florspar actually is. And, the reason why is that we get asked still, even though we've been at this for quite a while and I've done a lot of these presentations, you know, it's not heard about. And the reason why it's not heard heard about a lot is that the industry did get, shipped overseas during the nineties as a result of China industrializing. And as a result, that that very large US industry got shut down.

1:15 So it's a it's a critical mineral with strategic importance within The United States, and a critical mineral really refers to it is vital to the economic security of the country. And it's vital to the economic security of the country because it's involved in pretty much everything. It's in it's, aluminum, steel, hydrofluoric acid, fluorine, lithium ion batteries, glass, cement, you know, all of these different areas. It's from refrigeration units to air conditioning, to microchips. It it goes into pretty much everything. The the only reason it's not more well known about is because that industry has been shipped overseas. And it remains actually the, I think, the only nonmetallic critical mineral that is a 100%, imported into The US. There's a there's a big supply gap, and there is a big demand for it.

2:06 And as a result, even, against the, you know, global backdrop, China was one of the biggest producers in the world. It still is, but it's still a net in a net importer now. It it mined out its high grade minerals, its high grade floor spar, and has has since actually had to revert to sourcing, high grade floor spar from international locations to meet its own domestic and construction needs. And if you know anything about China, it wants to construct buildings and and steel, and it it needs floor spa to do it. And as a result, the price of floor spa has been rising, and even these prices you're seeing in front of you now are probably low compared to what you could retail floor spa now today, just given the few producers globally versus the fact that everybody needs this mineral for basically any sort of industrial operation.

2:59 So

3:03 so ARES got started back in 2020, beginning of twenty twenty on the on on the Toronto Stock Exchange and later moved on to the CSC. It identified the Utah project back in 2019, I think it was. And, originally, it was of interest because there was already an there was already an artisanal operation ongoing, and the the grades were rich enough where the artisanal miners were able to put a shovel in the ground and put the floor spar into a bag, and then take the bag and then just sell it directly to, to customers. Very rare in mining that anything like that exists at all. And we saw that actually with, the right investment, the right equipment, and the right team, this was something we could turn into a large scale industrial operation for a fraction of the cost that it would for a for a large mining operation.

3:58 And the what we we then did after we identified it, we we bought out the the permitted mining, the mine. And then we bought out the district wherever there were floor spar showings, and that took us close to 6,000 acres of of floor spa exhibiting land right across, the Spall Mountain Range to make it a district scale. And we also had to reach out to international, producers of floor spa for assistance. And because of those collaborations that we were able to actually design, or get the metallurgy done and design plants such as our Lumps plant and flotation plant, to create that large scale industrial operation. And we bought both of those plants, and they're both on-site now. And the Lumps plant itself is actually finished construction. It is being commissioned right now, and it's, you know, it's running material at low low levels through it already with, you know, imminent imminent production, thankfully, coming from that plant.

4:58 And the flotation plant, which will produce the higher grade acid spar, already, we are looking at government contracts to supply that material to rebuild The US' reservoirs of, of product that the Clinton administration sold off. So how do how do we really get there? I mentioned first location of the project. After we located the project and we realized that we had something quite special here, we we immediately went in and moved into a process of raising some initial money. Typically how any sort of exploration project begins. We raise money for drilling, exploration, assaying, metallurgy, geophysics, and we began to put together a picture of how the operational operation would look like once we once we developed ourselves into a fully a full manufacturing operation.

5:57 We did things were delayed quite substantially just because of COVID, but when we emerged out of that, there was very there was a lot of government, both state and federal support that was allocated to us. We were awarded a manufacturing bond by the state of Utah specifically for developing internal state industry. We also were awarded money from the USDA that allowed us to then go and buy a 40 acre industrial site, probably the only industrially zoned site in the whole area. That 50 acres allowed us to have warehousing and then begin actual construction process of pouring concrete in preparation for the for the plant. Because we were trying to build back something of national infrastructure importance, it did attract enough interest to acquire even more funding from the state of Utah and to facilitate some of the the private placements we're also doing at the same time.

6:56 All of that fed into big mine works, building ramp installations, edits, installing ventilation systems, building ponds, getting water permits, buying heavy machinery, bringing on mining staff and contractors, build building the lumps plant. We got we got very, very busy almost straight away, and there's been a lot of construction since then. We we've raised enough we we then got a substantial amount of interest from off potential off takers, and we began putting together commitments to supply both metallurgical grade and then later acid grade when we finally completed negotiations that have been very ongoing with the DOD for about a year to solidify a IDIQ contract to supply up to up to about 200, a contract with a ceiling limit of about $250,000,000, to, rebuild the national stockpiles of acid spar, within the country, which are, again, very important for defense purposes and long term strategic planning for the company to make sure you protect domestic industry if it's ever threatened.

8:09 As we as we advance through that, this year, we've we've done an enormous amount of construction and commissioning on the on the plant to get it ready in time with the anticipation that, you know, obviously, this year, we want to be able to start selling product and shipping it. And, you know, we're thankfully in that commissioning stage now where we have reached that point where we can begin finally shipping product out. How it'll look in the future is as we as we begin selling and becoming more self sufficient on the selling of metallurgical lumps to our partners, which which they require the product predominantly for the steel industry. We'll complete the flotation plant construction and then begin manufacturing the acid spa, the higher grade products with a sort of a higher premium for the general industry and also the DOD contract as well, which we've committed to.

9:00 So who are we within our company? Myself, I'm the chief executive officer in the company. I have a background in mining engineering, mechanical engineering, and nuclear engineering. I have been I have worked on building mines such as lithium operations, silver operations in the past. Victoria and Tom, who are part of my team as well, they've been they have extensive experience with mining operations, especially juniors. And now, Tom also has experience with taking junior mining operations into, actual producing operations, you know, revenue generating actual mining, which for a lot of exploration companies is a is a big step that they never quite make. Bob Lee is worth to mention as well as he was one of the individuals that we reached out to when we realized that a lot of the expertise around Florspar within The United States had been shipped out.

9:57 And he ran, fluorospore operations in countries like Thailand, and was able to, help us substantially with our metallurgical work and plant design. And, some of the, plant equipment that we've got still trace themselves to Bob. So and he's he's been enormously useful, I think, for that that expertise which we were missing, as we began our venture and realized that we're almost rebuilding an industry from scratch. So

10:28 the what's the the first targets we're going to have, the lost sheep, is is the the actual mining area, which is fully permitted out, and we've built all of the mine work infrastructure there necessary to get, you know, tens of thousands of tons of material out of the ground. That was the that was the actual first target when we realized that was fully permitted and it was grandfathered in, and we could just upscale the operation. But what we realized is that there was a bit of a history. And because the floor spar price had been killed by that cheap Chinese product that had flooded the market, a lot of these, adjacent claims to the lost sheep, they had lapsed because people had just moved on. It wasn't economic anymore to have any sort of substantial mining operation in Floor Spar. Now they either died off or let their claims lapse, and that whole district scale became available. So when we were targeting this particular mine, we realized that the entire district was was basically available all the way down to the Bell Hill claims, which is almost 10 you know, eight, nine miles of, contiguous showings going all the way down the mountainside.

11:40 So we staked all of them, and part of our exploration work did involve doing geophysics, sampling, metallurgical work across that district so we could identify, secondary and tertiary mine operations post lost sheep. And so we got that plan built out, but we want to make this a long term operation where we move down that mountain, taking advantage of what's already been built out and obviously creating the product necessary to feed into our, to our plants, which are pretty substantial systems capable of, throughput of quite a large amount of of floor spar. So that consolidated district should give us a long operational history. So the the Lost Sheep Mine, which I spoke about just now, the one we started with, when we started the drilling operation, we realized that there was a significant amount of floor spar still, at depth. And the reason why a lot of it had never really been accessed is that, because it had all been artisanally mined, the vast majority of the floor spar at this particular property had been missed because, the way artisanal miners had been operating was to look for floor spar showings at surface and follow them down. And as we began to drill down, we found enormous bodies of, of of floor spar there. And as we sampled them, we realized the grade was very high and wouldn't we'd need a particular amount of high amount of processing to to create sort of

13:12 a good a good product. And it it indicated as well that because the grade was very high and didn't need a lot of processing, the the OpEx would be relatively low. And so we believe we had a very good operation on here. Because of the nature of the noncontiguous ore bodies, we realized that an underground operation was gonna be very necessary, and so we built a, like, a corkscrew ramp installation deep into, the lost sheep area that can intersect the ore body at different levels. And this allowed us, obviously, to go even further deeper than any artist or miner had ever been able to go before, but access a lot of real untapped huge quantities of high grade floor spar, which had just, sat dormant for, you know, thousands of years, effectively waiting for ARES to come along and mine it.

14:01 But the nice part is that while China was mining its its high grade, this was sitting here, and the other only other properties that were developed around the world were were also very high grade systems. So now that the the world is in a position where a lot of the the floor spar is being being sourced and developed at the moment is much lower grade than what we have available to us naturally just essentially because it got preserved. So we're in a we're in a very advantageous position in terms of the operation of the reactor of the the floor spar itself. One also additionally interesting thing that we discovered as we began doing our metallurgical work is that, co embedded with a lot of the fluorspar was some very interesting minerals.

14:55 Chief amongst them, I think, was the gallium, which, and the germanium too, but the the gallium was coming in, higher concentrations than the the germanium. But, the the gallium itself was particularly interesting because, we realized that there was a potential to utilize our flotation plant to make a a a sort of a concentrate that we could ship to a refinery for further processing into a final product. So we're working through some of the metallurgy at the moment with groups like, Idaho State University and the AMES National Lab that have even come up with their own funding to, to help us with this metallurgical endeavor because there is, again, a demand for these minerals. China has cut off deliberately as part of economic warfare with The US supply of these systems to impede the tech the tech industry, and they remain a sort of a blue sky, potential for us in the future, which we will look to develop as we, as we build out, the the acid spar, flotation plant system.

16:02 And the nice part is that we are mining now. I mean, that's that's the good part about this. It's taken a while to get here, but the mining's operation. We've got the mining team in place. They are taking ore out of the ground. In that bottom right hand picture, that massive pile of of equipment, of material is high grade floor spar. I think we've got something like 12,000 tons we've put out of the ground, and it's just sitting there waiting for it to be trucked over to the lumps plant to begin processing into metallurgical lumps ready for industry. And that that top right hand picture is obviously the guys, carving their way into a floor spar pipe to begin removing material, to surface. We have a great team down there. They've worked incredibly hard on this. They created essentially an underground labyrinth of tunnels, that intersect floor spar all over the place.

16:52 And even better, we've as we've been mining at this hour, we've even discovered quite a lot of new deposits that we weren't aware of before just to, further lengthen the operational mine life of the of the lost sheep project. I think I'm very pleased to have arrived here. We we've started stock we started stockpiling a number of months ago, and I think we've reached a point now where, you know, it's it it's just incumbent on us to start moving that product over to the mine and making those metallurgical lumps for industry. The the only other part of it is that, well, all the heavy machinery has been bought, but we do have a sorry. You you can go to that next slide. We do have a two plant strategy with this as well. I have mentioned both the metallurgical grade referred to as MetSpa and the acid grade. Not actually acid in any way, but it it got the name because it was being used in the manufacture of hydrofluoric acid, which and you need that high grade for.

17:50 Oh, sorry. Right. K. The meth the MetSpa plant is ready to go. The lumps we have create that the plant is capable of manufacturing, they they earn a bit of a premium because they come in a form which the steel industry is finds more palatable for their processes. We've we were able to meet the spec of a lot of customers that want the product as well, so we know that's good to go. And, obviously, they're just waiting on us. They've been waiting on us very patiently quite a while because a domestic source of floor spar is obviously incredibly beneficial to, you know, domestic industry, especially the steel industry, which needs in the region of 20 pounds of floor spar per ton of steel that gets produced. And if you think there's 80,000,000 tons of steel that gets produced in The US on an annual basis, you need a lot of met spa.

18:45 And our flotation plant, which we've bought in full, we've delivered out all of the components to site. The nice part about this second plant is that we'll we'll not take as long to construct as the metallurgical plant because a lot of the the metallurgical plant doubles up as the initial, process for the acid spar plant and readies it for the flotation cells. So we can bring that plant online, fortunately,

19:12 a lot quicker, and a lot of the infrastructure is shared as a result, not to mention the fact that the mine is already built out now, creates a much finer, powder form of high grade material that's over that 97%, and it does command a premium. And even that that pricing there is almost certainly out of date now, and it would retail for probably significantly more than that now, domestic source of floor spa for industry. That will go predominantly to things like hydrofluoric acid, fluorine, refrigeration units, those those kind of items. And just to give you a bit of a sense of the scale of this, even these pictures are a bit old, but all the electricals are, are installed. The lumps plant or every piece of equipment is installed now. It's all running in tandem with itself.

20:02 Now, a lot of this infrastructure that you can see, certainly in that bottom left picture, that's infrastructure that doubles up to be able to use be utilized by the flotation plant as well, even though this plant here is predominantly for the lumps plant. It it did take us quite a while to get all the electrical systems in place, belt conveyors, steel, the fabrication, the piping. It is a big it is a big operation, probably admittedly bigger than we first anticipated, but we have significant industrial capacity now to produce a lot of product for industry. And the the plan now, once this is on, will be to ramp up the feed material that goes into this so we can produce more product for industry.

20:52 So, on the on the customer front, the Kramer Group, the Kramer OS Contour, they've been, a partner with us for quite a while. We have some announcements that go back quite away with them. They've been very patiently waiting for us to come online. They're still, sending people to visit our sites, almost on a monthly basis at the moment in anticipation for being able to take this product. We are sending the material, that they're obviously running past their customers, And we're now beginning to coordinate things like rail rail coordination, loading destination ports just in preparation for when we get going.

21:38 And we have this this this offtake agreement, this MOU in place with them to provide. And, again, their their predominant customer, the is the the metal industry, the steel industry. Again, big demand, and there's a lot of insecurity created around the industry by not having this floor spar available. If you have to make steel without it, there's not many other derivatives that can you can substitute in for it. And if you don't and if you don't have the floor spar, you're looking at a product that might not be nearly as good a quality and might cost you significantly more because you don't create that that individual, individually tailored flux that FloorSpa can provide. And a big announcement we had much earlier in the year, was that we had been through a due diligence and scrutiny period with the Department of Defense.

22:32 And finally, we did sign an agreement with the Pentagon for, the supply of, acid spars, so that higher grade material. In order to get there, we obviously had to provide a very high degree of confidence that we would be successful, in the production of acid spar for, for the, department of defense. And the nice part about this is that it is a stockpiling operation, so we can just run trucks from our processing facility through right through to where they do stockpile of the the minerals, which is in fairly close proximity to our actual operations. So, it the contract will be expected to run for about five years from first production, and we should be able to start shipping product to them next year.

23:20 And to be honest, if we wanted, we could probably, drive all of our product into this, into this offtake agreement with the with the Department of Defense and have a very comfortable next few years just supplying them with product that they need to rebuild the national stockpiles at.

23:42 So, we are a CSE listed company up here in Canada, but we also do list on the OTCQX and actually, you in Germany on the Frankfurt Exchange as well. Market cap sitting somewhere in about the 70 millions. We are looking at potentially an uplift in the future as well to the Nasdaq, and we actually have started the process, to begin that uplift process. Again, it makes it a lot easier for US investors to, to get involved. A number of brokerage firms do have difficulty with pink sheets stocks in The US, like OTCQX. So when we do complete that uplist process, hopefully, this year, we will get hopefully, that, we'll see hopefully, see, a corresponding beneficial effect in the share prices.

24:34 More US or, brokerages are allowed to trade our stock, which has been rather inhibiting, I think, for the the the growth of the the company, particularly given it's a very unique US story. And we are the only, permitted floor spar operation in The US as well. And, certainly, there's there's nothing, I think, on the horizon close to producing, Florspar in the same way that we are in any meaningful capacity. So we have we have a massive jump on the market, and the only, competitors we would have that we would see would be international. And even then, we have a a much greater advantage just given the domestic nature of our of our product. Great. James, maybe I could just, jump back in just to give you a small pause.

25:25 Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just wanted the company to take a few moments to review your questions submitted already. I'd like to remind you, recording this presentation along with a copy of the slides will be available post today's meeting. Let me first off by just apologizing for our slight delay this morning. Paul, as you can see, you've had a number of questions that both presubmitted and submitted through today's meeting. Thank you to everybody for your engagement. If I may just hand back to you just to moderate us through the q and a, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Absolutely. Thank you, Mark. And thank you, James, for, for going through that presentation with us. We know this is a particularly busy period of time, for you right now, so, we do really appreciate you taking the time out to to keep us all updated on on how things are progressing and the next steps for the business.

26:14 Also wanna say thank you to all of the audience that have come tonight and for submitting the questions ahead of time. We do have quite a lots of questions that we're gonna try and get through. But if we haven't been able to answer your question, please bear with us. We will we will try and get a response to, to you and an update as as soon as possible, after after tonight. So, James, busy period. Yeah. Extremely. So so busy. I think I was a couple minutes late to this call. That's okay. We'll we'll forgive you. We'll forgive you. We'll just jump straight into the questions. I know everybody's pretty eager, to get some answers. The first one, I I think, really, is is focusing on the ramp up of production that was announced, with the target of August 15.

27:07 How how is that look getting looking right now, and how is, are we on track, or is there any delays that we we should be made aware of? Like, we I I I would have been very cautious about the any date that we released unless I had a high confidence we could do it. So, thankfully, we're not gonna miss the dates. Like, it's like, the commissioning has gone great. And so, you know, we can start putting product into the into the, the plants, and actually start producing that product. But the commissioning this this last month has been going very, very nicely. I think the the big obstacles we faced a few months ago when we realized a lot of the electricals needed to be done, we've got all of that done, and we have this incredibly comprehensive, electrical system that we've built out at the at the processing site.

27:55 It's easily sufficient now to house the flotation system electronics as well. We've had we have some great electrical engineers as well that we brought in to build all this out. And it as I said, like, I I never expected it to be this comprehensive, a manufacturing operation. It sort of ballooned in that respect. But now that we build it out, like, the capacity potential we've got is is much more elevated than originally planned. Yeah. Makes sense. So do you have an idea roughly of of when the company can start to expect its first revenues from the MetSpar lumps?

28:29 So there's obviously, there's gonna be there's the sale, and then there's the payment period that will come, like, thirty days or sixty days after that. But with with product going in, you know, in a few days, an actual first first lumps being produced, you know, we can start actually sending product next month. You know? Fantastic. You know, that that's I mean, we've we've got to that point now. It's the everything's built. The mine is built. The mining operations are built. It's all it's all permitted. We've got the generators on-site. We've got we've got, the water system there. You know, it's effect effectively, there's nothing really stopping us now from actually producing that first product apart from just completing this commissioning phase, putting product in there, and then beginning to ship it. Congratulations, gems. I know you don't drink, but surely there's gotta be a a bottle of something pumped that day. Yeah. Like, I I I some points of this project, I thought about taking up drinking.

29:32 Well, do you have an idea of of the short and long term revenue projections once things are are starting to ramp up? How does how does the next year to three years look? Yeah. Like, obviously, there's always a bit of a ramp up period when you start. I'd imagine initially. I mean, the the the nice thing about the plants is that they can manufacture well in excess of what we expect we can actually drag out of the mine. So in a way, the limitation isn't on our production amount. It's just how much we can get out of that ramp installation system. But even then, once we you know, give us give us several months to, to optimize that operation of getting it out of the ramp, moving it to the Delta site, processing those lumps, putting them on the back of a railcar, you know, we can be looking at, you know, getting up to, you know, thousands of tons on an annual basis, like, quite easily. We we we looking I wanna get up to a point where we may you know, generating somewhere between 20 to $30,000,000 in revenue before the flotation plant is coming online and then bringing that online for that additional bonus.

30:39 I I do, in the long run, want to open up, secondary or tertiary portals just to allow for extra throughput to put into the mine, and then then we could see that that revenue range increase quite substantially. So and the the, you know, the prospects are there. Like, we know there's floor spar all over our district. So the question now is, you know, do we obviously, we can open up additional, access to pipes through that existing ramp installation, but we still might be limited somewhat on what we can remove from the pipe just given that it's one, one ramp. And then, you know, loaders and, and dozers can only go in one at a time down this sort of, this pipe installation.

31:24 But, additional ramps could mean doubling, and and, you know, three ramps could mean tripling of the potential, output we could get from the mine site, and the plant could take all of it too. We we don't even need to run the plant twenty four hours. We can run that as a normal, manufacturing operation on normal working hours and shut it down for the weekend so everyone can go home, and it would still be able to churn through tens of thousands of tons on an annual basis. Do you you said you said there I know this is a this is a probably a a goal, but 20 to 30,000,000. Do you think that that is attainable within the next three years? Oh, no. Yes. Certainly within the next three years. There should be no problem with that at all. I mean, I I I'm obviously trying to avoid giving any sort of near term estimates, but I expect it to be substantially earlier than two to three years. Great.

32:15 Well, that's exciting news. And just about those, secondary and tertiary, targets that you have, Have you have you made any steps to start permitting or opening up those mines? Yes. So we did buy our own drilling system, so we've got that in place too. And we also did some satellite imagery over the top of the mountain. Now this is this is to create new mines, so set almost separate from the lost sheep. But in addition to that too is that we've realized that there's substantially more floor spar on the lost sheep property than we we we originally realized. So it opens up a lot more access to material. The constraint there, again, is that it's how much we can actually just remove from that ramp installation system. But there's substantial amounts of floor spar in the vicinity of the Lost Sheep Mine too, which would if we build secondary and tertiary ramp installations over the next several months, we could just open up enormous quantities of floor spar additional, and then run a a very a very big operation. And the the nice part about it is that it the the demand is large enough that even if we upscale quickly, they would eat up all of our demand.

33:26 At the moment, the I think the main disappointment from customers is that we can't produce more. And and and it's a nice situation to be in, you know, facing that as your constraint. You know, build up as fast as you can will take it. It's a very nice position to be in. Yeah. For sure. Do you have an idea roughly of the percentage of US Metspar demands that ARES would be able to meet? So, initially, it's gonna be a very small percentage. I mean, if you if you think about something like I mean, we touched on this earlier on the presentation that The US utilizes something like 80, 20 pounds of floor spar per ton of steel when there's 18,000,000 tons of steel produced on an annual basis. I mean, the steel industry would eat up the fluorospar by itself.

34:13 That's not considering things like uranium enrichment, hydrofluoric fluorine, lithium ion batteries, cement, glass industries, refrigeration units, Teflon. All of these industries require quite a lot of floor spa, and we can't the steel industry alone would eat up more than we can produce initially and still need more than the the you know, our our excess production could could manage. So in terms of raw products, I know that The US imports something like 600,000 tons on an annual basis, But that's still a underestimate of what it actually needs because that 600,000 tons is raw fluorospar products. No downstream buy products that are used in, like, uranium enrichment, like uranium hexafluoride or, microchip manufacture or, derivatives that are used in things like fluorine production.

35:14 It's really in the order of millions of tons that are needed on an annual basis. So in raw imports alone, we're less than 10% of full capacity. In terms of actual floor spa requirements within the country, I mean, it's probably probably, like, a couple of percent of what the we we can produce of what The US actually needs. Yeah. Sounds like you're gonna have to put your prices up. I think you're right. Yeah. And specifically about the interest in in your target customers. I I know you did touch on this a little bit in the presentation, but, what other interests are you seeing, in the product? And then specifically in regards to Kramer, ARSContour, can Can you share any details on the MOU or the the potential contract that you have with them?

36:07 So in in terms of other customers outside of them, I would say enrichment of uranium is oh, sorry. Not really enrichment of uranium. The the feed material that goes into enrichment of uranium. So when you have yellow cake, it the next process in that in that supply chain is to make uranium hexafluoride, which is the feed material for uranium for for enrichment. That goes into making fuel for civil nuclear reactors, for submarines, for aircraft carriers, for weapons. There's a big demand for that material to feed into that process. Not and, obviously, this is this is excluding, what metallurgical grade that, Kramer is interested in is is after.

36:55 Internationally, I would say we're getting a lot of interest from Japanese customers and Korean because, obviously, they they don't have the sort of the depth of resources that The US and Canada have. And for that reason, they're looking to try and derisk their industries, particularly their heavy industries. They still have aluminum and steel production. They still have heavy chemicals that they need to manufacture. A lot of these all require floor spar, and so they're after high quality products from a stable a stable country source. And so a lot of the international, interest that we're getting is coming from these Southeast Asian countries to do with their heavy industry. Again, you know, huge level of interest that's again, like, no matter how much we ramp up, even if even if it by some miracle, we could meet all of The US demand, there's this international demand that's still out there, as everyone looks to try and derisk their long term industry, like heavy industry, by securing long term offtake contracts.

38:00 So it's it's it's way in excess of, of what we can produce. So Great. Good problem to have. And just, again, just on that Kramer, ARS CONTOR, are you are you able to share any more details on that specific contract? So they are I think the the most pertinent thing to with them is that they are more interested in the metallurgical grade because they are more materials broker for that particular type of industry, steel, those kind of I think those are the predominant customers they're looking to focus on. So the way this would work, I think, with the with the agreement with them is that we would load up our rail cars. We do have our own rail spur. They would take ownership of the material once it was loaded into the rail car system, and then they would be responsible for shipping it to the customer base at that point.

38:51 Again, very nice operation for us. We have our own mining operation. We have our own processing. We just need to deposit onto the Union Pacific Rail Spur, then they take it and deliver it from there. And and, yeah, they would be caged mostly towards US industry US domestic industry. Okay. Thanks thanks for that. And just to deviate slightly now towards the flotation plants. Again, I I know you've you spoke on this a little bit during the presentation, but when do you expect that to the works on that to start? And do you have an idea of of completion on that yet? And and then there's side question on this regarding, the permit from Millard County, Planning Commission. Do you think that would affect the progress at all?

39:41 Well, I don't know about the second question yet, but, like, actually, with that second question, which I don't know which permit they're referring to. Like, we got the water quality permit. We got the discharge permit. We got the what else? I don't think we're missing anything, on that. So maybe that's just maybe that's old news. But for instance, I you know, we happy to publish those permits as well so everyone can see them that we've got everything in place that we need. Air quality, I think I think that's all taken care of on that front. What was the first part of the question? Just the status of the flotation plants. And Oh. Do you guys have an idea roughly of when you think it might be operational? So, like, obviously, work is continuous. So as, the the idea here is that as the lumps plant completes, we just move the crew straight over to to the construction of the flotation plant. Already with the flotation plant, the design around the fabrication of the building is being done at the moment. So the the flotation plant itself is not like the lumps plant. It can't sit outside except for exactly just because of the nature of the flotation cells and the water usage.

40:52 But the, that has already started. A lot of the infrastructure that the flotation plant needs is shared with the lumps plant. So, effectively, you've got the lumps plant, and then you're creating an offshoot process that comes off it. So it's arguable that a lot of the flotation plant process has already been constructed and completed. I do wanna have that flotation plant up and running in the first half of next year so we can start sending product to the DOD. We do have time on our sides with that contract, but I wanna get going with it and and start honoring it early and, you know, beat expectations on delivery schedules. It is a big contract too, and there are some years where we will have to produce a lot to meet, sort of their five year schedule.

41:40 Pays to get ahead and, reproducing a lot for them so we can get those stockpiles up to a sufficient level. And the nice part is because it has a, an elevated ceiling, in excess of, the original order, we can actually produce more, than was originally envisaged and and claim more, more money in the bank from the the the sale of material to the DOD. But, yeah, like, I wanna as I mean, the the answer really is as soon as possible. I think everybody would answer that. But, fortunately, a lot of the work has been done and the infrastructure's done, and it's already a permitted site, you know, with, you know, with the water permits all in place already. So Fantastic. I know we only have a little a few more minutes, so I'm just gonna ask some some shorter questions just to to try and get through this quickly.

42:33 Just in regards to fundraising, do you foresee any need for, further funding this year? I think we're in a very comfortable position at the moment. From where we are and and we got revenues coming in, we should be a self sustaining company fairly quickly, which is a nice place for any exploration company to to be. Actually, we won't even be an exploration company anymore. We'll be a manufacturing company. We do wanna do an uplift. There might be then then there there might be some financing related to that process as we as we transition from OTC to, to NASDAQ. But I think we're I think we're in a nice position at the moment where we're not we're not worried. It's it's really just an execution phase now that we're in. Okay.

43:22 You touched on the Nasdaq listing. Do you have an ETA on on roughly when you would expect that to to happen? And then there is a there is a question, on the minimum share price requirements, for the Nasdaq. So is ARES considering a reverse split in order to meet that criteria? So the Nasdaq listing, we've been at this now for a few months, just going back and forth of the process. We've had comments already submitted, got the second round in, revised documentation. I mean, I would really like to have it completed within the next couple months and get this going and and get and get rid of the distraction because it is a lot of work and all that paperwork getting this done. And on top of commissioning the mine, it's like everything's coming at once.

44:12 So next couple of months, it'd be nice to get this out of the way and get trading on the Nasdaq, especially as a manufacturing company with government contracts, with revenue coming in the door. Like, I imagine we'll have at a time when critical minerals are really under focus, we should have a very nice market response, you know, just given all the things we've got in our favor. Plus, we were the only producer of floor spar in the country. And the other the other thing about a rollback is it's not necessary. So the the the way that they would work is that in the you have something called an ADR. I've forgotten what it stands for at the moment, but, the ADR means it's pegged. So the Canadian price does not change. You don't need a rollback to create that, that minimum amount that the the Nasdaq requires to list, like $45 or whatever it is, you just peg it. So the, The US share price could be whatever it is, $89, and the Canadian price would be as it is. And nobody gets rolled back, who has that who has that stock. So we have put that ADR in place, again, to protect shareholders. I know everyone gets annoyed when they get rolled back.

45:22 And, unfortunately, when people do uplist to the Nasdaq, they do get rolled back to try and meet that minimum. We've deliberately put in place a mechanism, the ADR mechanism, so no so they don't get rolled back as part of that Nasdaq uplisting. Thank thank you for explaining that, James. I think we're out of time, unfortunately. I know there's a lot of other questions. Again, we will try and get those answers and distributed to everybody. But just before we end, James, any any closing comments that you wanted to make? No. Like, I'm I I think we've got a wonderful shareholder base. Like, you know, I I know a lot of you. You know, you've been stuck with us for a long time waiting for us to get to this stage. We finally got there. So, like, I hope you're as relieved as I am. You know, no one ever said mining was easy, but, like, it's what's nice is that it's there's so few companies that ever get to this stage where you you come out of exploration and get into mining, and I see why it is an enormous challenge.

46:19 And to get to that that phase, it's gonna be very nice for the shareholders to get an uplift and to see some success and, you know, and to to to basically benefit from their investment and their support of the company of the few over the over the previous years as we built this. I think that's the main thing is that I'm just I'm I'm I'm very appreciative of people's patience, and just staying with the story until we got to this point. That's great. Paul, thank you very much indeed for moderating the q and a. James, you thank for for taking the time to present and give us those answers today. Can please ask investors not to close the session as we'll now automatically redirect you so you can provide your feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company. On behalf of the management team of ARES STRATEGIC, thank you very much indeed for your time, and wish you all a good rest of your day.